Bankrolling the Anti-Immigration Movement

Hosted by Michael Barbaro and Natalie Kitroeff; produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Luke Vander Ploeg and Theo Balcomb, with help from Jazmín Aguilera; and edited by Paige Cowett and Lisa Tobin

Much of the money behind the movement can be traced to one heiress who made it her life’s work to keep immigrants out of America.

Monday, August 19th, 2019

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: Newly unearthed documents tell the story of a rich, environmentally-minded heiress who helped sow the seeds of the modern anti-immigration movement. My colleague Nick Kulish tells Natalie Kitroeff about his investigation. It’s Monday, August 19.

nicholas kulish

Her name is pronounced Cordelia Scaife May.

natalie kitroeff

Scaife.

nicholas kulish

Scaife.

natalie kitroeff

Tell me about Cordelia Scaife May’s life as a young woman.

nicholas kulish

Cordelia May was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. And when the first photos of her appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the country, they asked, could this be the richest baby in the world?

[music]

nicholas kulish

She was an heiress to the Mellon family fortune. They were barons of banking, titans of industry with oil, aluminum, all the sort of might of Pittsburgh distilled into cold, hard cash. She was raised outside Pittsburgh in a mansion that was known as Penguin Court because her mother was trying to breed and raise emperor penguins to waddle the ground. She was so excited about Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic expeditions.

archived recording

Expeditions have been sent or are expected to be sent by Britain, Australia, Norway, Chile, Russia and the Argentine. But Admiral Byrd’s will surely be the biggest.

nicholas kulish

Cordelia herself as a young girl was super into animals. She had purebred dogs. The family had horses. She was very into nature, and birds in particular. You know, from the outside, it seemed like Cordelia had this fabulous life. But actually, she was quite unhappy. Her mother was an alcoholic, and she once described that there was no laughter in her household growing up.

natalie kitroeff

So what’s the story that explains how she gets from that childhood to her interest in immigration policy?

nicholas kulish

You know, it’s actually a long story, and a story that begins in her youth with her unlikely friendship or admiration for Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

archived recording (margaret sanger)

I guess I was what I would call a born humanitarian.

nicholas kulish

Sanger was a close friend of her grandmother’s, and someone she described as the only person who brought any joy into her house as a child. Initially she wasn’t drawn to Sanger because of her politics and her pursuit of family planning and birth control for women. It was actually that she’d been to jail, which appealed to Cordelia’s rebellious streak as a young woman.

natalie kitroeff

So she thinks Sanger is cool.

nicholas kulish

She thinks Sanger is very cool. But over time, that friendship and her desire to emulate Margaret Sanger led her to engage deeply with Planned Parenthood and other birth control and population issues.

natalie kitroeff

And at this point, what is Planned Parenthood and Sanger’s work all about?

nicholas kulish

At that point, it’s really about access to contraceptives. It’s about family planning. It’s about taking women, first in the United States and then around the world, from just having as many kids as they end up getting pregnant with, and choosing, I want to have two kids. I want to have three kids. This is when I want to have them. Family planning in the most literal sense.

archived recording (cordelia may)

The people that come to our organization and want to have the same methods or whatever it is that one can have to prevent pregnancy. And those women will say to us, I — we ask their religion very often. And they say, I am a Catholic. I was raised in the Catholic church. This, my church is wrong on this. And that is said over and over and over again.

natalie kitroeff

And what about that is attractive to May? Why is that interesting to this heiress?

nicholas kulish

She was really passionate about the natural environment and preserving it. And that really dovetails with birth control for her, because she sees overpopulation as destroying the habitats of the animals that she loves so much. But in addition to that, she was — from what we read in her letters, she was a feminist. She cared about women’s issues. Women should have a right to plan their smaller families, and the birds and the bees and the bunny rabbits should have as much room to roam as possible.

natalie kitroeff

So what does she do with that new focus?

nicholas kulish

Well, she becomes involved with a group known as the Population Council, which was founded by a member of another of America’s great families, John D. Rockefeller III.

archived recording

Gushing oil, America’s black gold, was the foundation of his empire. Today, the giants of the oil industry stand as monuments to Rockefeller, the architect of our business age.

nicholas kulish

The Population Council’s goal was to lower birthrates around the world, and she went to birth control clinics in Chicago. She visited family planning efforts in Korea and Japan and Taiwan. And perhaps most importantly, she and her family gave $11.4 million to the council during the 1960s, which was a lot of money in those days. As time goes on, you can see her already becoming more militant. In the 1970s, she’s sort of pushing up against the Population Council’s desire to stick with contraceptives and keep abortion at arm’s length. And she and her representatives are saying, we have to make abortion upon request something that’s available to all women. The pace of controlling population is too slow. The growth of the global population is too much.

natalie kitroeff

So she starts to take more hard-line positions, even though, in this case, it’s about something we now think of as a progressive measure, which is universal access to abortion.

nicholas kulish

Right, exactly. Abortion appears to be less about family planning and more about controlling the population.

natalie kitroeff

So where does her story go from here?

nicholas kulish

Well, something very important and actually tragic takes place in her life. In August 1973, she secretly marries her childhood friend and longtime companion, Robert W. Duggan. And he is the district attorney for the county that includes Pittsburgh. And rather than a giant, lavish wedding in a cathedral somewhere, they get married in a rinky-dink little room with knotty pine walls on Lake Tahoe in Nevada. They pay a justice of the peace $5. And perhaps more importantly, they don’t tell anyone. So if you’re this heiress, why do you have this quickie wedding? Well, her longtime friend, her longtime companion, is under investigation for corruption. He has apparently been taking payoffs from illegal gambling rings, you know, to look the other way. And essentially, his defense is, I’m getting the money from her. Unfortunately, this defense does not work. The investigation and the prosecution starts closing in on him. And eventually, he is indicted for tax evasion. And on the day that he is indicted, he is found dead from a shotgun wound outside his country house. It appears that he shot himself, that it’s a self-inflicted wound.

natalie kitroeff

So how does that tragedy affect her work?

nicholas kulish

It appears — and there’s a little speculation involved in this, obviously. But it appears to make her a little more radical. There’s a harder edge to her letters and to what she’s writing to people at that time after the tragedy. And her attitude toward family planning starts to change. Her aide goes to the Population Council and tells them that she thinks family planning is a waste of money. The Rockefeller aide who takes the meeting says that he almost got the impression that she favored compulsory sterilization. And for the first time, something comes up that we’d never seen before, which is the idea that, quote, the U.S. should seal its border with Mexico.

natalie kitroeff

And how do you understand why she made this jump from being so focused on population control to immigration?

nicholas kulish

There’s a sort of confluence of events that helps bring this about, right?

archived recording

Dr. Ehrlich, when did the thought first come to you that perhaps our time as mankind on Earth was limited?

archived recording (paul ehrlich)

Oh, it came in 1949 when —

nicholas kulish

Population control was a really big concern with the baby boom.

archived recording (paul ehrlich)

The thing that’s important remember about population control is that if we want to avoid a tremendous rise in the death rate, we absolutely must have a tremendous decrease in the birthrate.

nicholas kulish

Now, there’s a famous book called “The Population Bomb” by a Stanford professor named Paul Ehrlich.

archived recording (paul ehrlich)

So the first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say, from now, here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one if you’re starting a family now — not any law, but just say this is what responsible people do.

nicholas kulish

But in the late 1970s, the birthrate has fallen quite a bit. We’re out of the baby boom at this point. And among the biggest contributors to population growth in the United States is immigration.

archived recording

America was founded by immigrants. We are the so-called melting pot of the world. And most of those immigrants entered this nation legally.

nicholas kulish

In 1978, Border Patrol apprehended close to 900,000 unauthorized immigrants.

archived recording

Today, however, illegal aliens are a great and continuing problem.

nicholas kulish

And another 600,000 legal immigrants are also arriving, the greatest number since the 1920s. So if your concern is how many people are there in the United States, then your focus starts to shift toward immigrants.

natalie kitroeff

Does she seem to care who the immigrants are? Is there part of this that’s about race?

nicholas kulish

She says that it’s not about race. Very colorfully, she says, why can’t we just imagine putting paper bags over the heads of the immigrants so we’re only counting their deleterious numbers rather than being accused of racism because most of these people happen to not be white? And yet in one of her most strident documents, she isn’t saying, the Norwegians are pouring into Minnesota. It’s Filipinos in Hawaii, as she puts it, quote, “Orientals” sneaking across the Canadian border, Latin Americans coming into Florida. And she says that the Cuban refugees, quote, “breed like hamsters.”

natalie kitroeff

So the language at least suggests that at least some of this is about racism.

nicholas kulish

She says she isn’t racist, but the people that she’s worried about are not the white immigrants. It’s the immigrants from non-white countries that she’s preoccupied with.

[music]

natalie kitroeff

We’ll be right back. Nick, why does this matter for the modern immigration movement? What exactly does that have to do with the evolving views of this one rich woman?

nicholas kulish

It matters because Cordelia Scaife May puts her money where her mouth is. And she has a lot of money. Equally important is in 1978, she meets a very unusual gentleman named Dr. John Tanton, an ophthalmologist who, in his spare time, likes to form political advocacy groups.

natalie kitroeff

He’s an ophthalmologist who — his side gig is forming public pressure groups?

nicholas kulish

Exactly. He’s like a character out of a Frank Capra movie up in this small town in Michigan, this very charismatic, good-looking, square-jawed guy who’s just great at getting people excited about an issue. It’s weird, but he’s really good at it. He actually was involved in a lot of the same issues. He was involved in environmental issues. He was involved in a group called Zero Population Growth, which was exactly what it sounds like. So through these circles from the population movement, Dr. Tanton got acquainted with Mrs. May. And he came to her seeking her help, which is to say her money, to get his group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, off the ground.

natalie kitroeff

And does she help out?

nicholas kulish

She does. She provides him with $50,000 in seed money, with the one condition that she remains anonymous. She is in the background. She is not tied to this work.

[music]

nicholas kulish

And he starts the group, and she gives him more money, and more money, and more money, to the point where there’s an internal memorandum where he writes that “Mrs. May has been our single biggest supporter. She just gave us another $400,000. That relationship is pretty well under control.” And the more money that she gives him, the more ambitious he becomes. He spins off the research arm of FAIR into something called the Center for Immigration Studies.

archived recording

The Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit public interest institution, looking into immigration’s effects on social and economic interests in the U.S.

nicholas kulish

He moves the legal litigation group and turns it into the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

archived recording

We’re a national public interest organization working for rational immigration policies. We seek to end illegal immigration and maintain legal immigration rates under an overall ceiling consistent with America’s domestic priorities.

nicholas kulish

Pretty soon, he’s starting to build almost an ecosystem of groups that reinforce each other. The Center for Immigration Studies has a report that is cited by FAIR or is used in a legal memorandum that’s written by the Immigration Reform Law Institute. And it isn’t clear to everyone that these groups are all coming from the same place.

natalie kitroeff

Nick, given that May comes from a very well-known and very wealthy family, I wonder if they have a reaction to the way that she’s suddenly spending the family fortune.

nicholas kulish

There are some family members who are also contributing to this cause. But in one instance that really upset her, she describes in a letter how a young cousin asked her whether the causes she were supporting weren’t discriminatory, racist. And what actually bothers her the most is not the accusation that it could be racist or discriminatory, but, as she puts it, “the one that really puts my teeth on edge ... ‘elitist.’” And so in response to this cousin’s question, she goes home and produces a five-page, typed response in which she tries to lay out her ideas. And this is, by the way, a document that was never before public and I think is the most complete record of her ideas on this subject. In her view, legal and illegal immigration lead to overpopulation. And that is responsible for a whole host of ills. She calls it the root cause of unemployment, inflation, urban sprawl, highway, skyway congestion, shortages of all sorts, not the least of which is energy, vanishing farmland, environmental deterioration and civil unrest. And she talks about how medical science has succeeded in reducing infant mortality rates, but it’s juxtaposed in the very same sentence with the idea of veterinarians prolonging the lives, quote, “of useless cattle.” She talks about how birthrates have dropped in a few areas, and millions die of starvation every year, but population growths continue to climb. And there’s certain things — it’s uncomfortable when you read “even wars no longer make much dent; during the 11 years of conflict, both North and South Vietnam showed a net increase in population.”

natalie kitroeff

Yikes.

nicholas kulish

And this is also the place where she talks about this idea that the country is being invaded.

natalie kitroeff

So help us understand May’s actual impact on the development of this movement, which feels so connected to the ideas that she’s articulating here.

nicholas kulish

Well, there are all these groups. The big three that people think about the most are NumbersUSA, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. And they put their might together and are able to pressure, at all levels, the government — at the local level, at the state level.

archived recording

Elizabeth Mayor Thomas Dunn has instructed his city employees to speak only English during working hours. The English-only rule, according to the mayor, applies to business and private conversations as well.

nicholas kulish

Pushing English language laws.

archived recording

The Senate Judiciary Committee began considering a proposed constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States.

nicholas kulish

Laws that make it tougher for illegal immigrants to live in certain towns.

archived recording

California’s Republican Governor Pete Wilson wants to cut off social services to illegal immigrants and to deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children.

nicholas kulish

Proposition 187 that was meant to restrict public benefits to undocumented people in California.

archived recording

After he announced his proposals in August, his poll ratings rose. Wilson finds support among members of such groups as the Federation for American Immigration Reform. That’s a national organization, which contends that immigrants are a drain on America’s resources.

nicholas kulish

This goes all the way up to Congress.

archived recording (george w. bush)

The United States Senate is debating a very vital issue for our country, and that is immigration reform. I urge the senators to continue to work toward a comprehensive bill.

nicholas kulish

One of the groups, NumbersUSA, they managed to get millions of calls and faxes and letters to congresspeople.

archived recording

Republicans have been bolting from the president on this issue. They believe that he’s absolutely tone-deaf. And he continues to go down this road even though many members of his party, both in the House and the Senate, object.

nicholas kulish

And a lot of folks think that they’re the most important reason that immigration reform was derailed under George W. Bush.

archived recording

We have a number of grassroots groups now working to stop them from getting the 15 votes they needed for cloture last time and failed on it. The risk to the president — he’s not on the ballot again, and he has believed in this from day one. And so he wants this, very much so. He views it as a legacy item. But the risk for the Republican Party is a lot of conservatives think if you pass this legislation, some of the base will stay home in the 2008 elections, and you will have even more damage after the heartache of 2006 for the Republican Party. That is the calculation. The president and his team disagree, but many conservatives think if even just a little bit of our base stays home, more trouble.

natalie kitroeff

So it seems like there’s this broad base of support for all of these anti-immigration ideas. But in reality, they are all stemming from one source, which is Mrs. May.

nicholas kulish

Right. It feels like a groundswell. But then when you look back at their roots and when you look back at where their money is coming from, Mrs. May and Dr. Tanton are always behind it.

natalie kitroeff

And these groups, the big three that you mentioned, these are groups that have enormous resonance in today’s political atmosphere, right? I mean, they have a ton of influence.

nicholas kulish

Right. They have more influence, I’d say, now than they ever have before. And that’s in part because they cultivated allies like —

archived recording (jeff sessions)

We have a goal.

nicholas kulish

Jeff Sessions.

archived recording (jeff sessions)

And that goal is to end the lawlessness that now exists in our immigration system.

nicholas kulish

Who became attorney general.

archived recording (jeff sessions)

I have put in place a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. If you cross the southwest border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple.

nicholas kulish

And his aide, Stephen Miller, who is now the most important person, probably, in government when it comes to immigration issues.

archived recording (stephen miller)

I’d like to thank everyone here today, and especially at the Center for Immigration Studies, for everything they do to illuminate a debate that far too often operates, like illegal immigrants, in the shadows. [LAUGHTER]

natalie kitroeff

And so you see these groups created through May’s money cultivating allies in Congress. The key ones here are Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller. And now we know these are folks who have brought their hard-line immigration policies and beliefs with them to the White House, to the administration.

nicholas kulish

In many cases, it feels like they wrote the playbook. And now Miller is calling the plays. And it goes beyond that.

archived recording (kellyanne conway)

It’s just that border security is national security, and we have a flood of drugs coming into this country and into our communities.

nicholas kulish

Kellyanne Conway, the president’s adviser, was doing polling for these groups. I think a lot of people don’t realize that.

archived recording (kellyanne conway)

We have, obviously, an increase in gang members coming over.

nicholas kulish

Other folks from FAIR, from CIS, have moved into important positions in the government’s immigration apparatus.

archived recording (kellyanne conway)

We’ve got 31 sanctuary cities, six sanctuary states. You’ve got people wanting to make us an entire sanctuary country. We just need Democrats to come to the table and be honest with themselves and who they’ve been in the recent past.

natalie kitroeff

And how do you see all these officials with ties to this movement influencing the Trump administration’s policies on immigration?

nicholas kulish

They’re inside the government now, and they have the chance, more so probably than ever before, to enact an agenda that they’ve been pursuing, everything from militarizing the border —

archived recording (donald trump)

Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military.

nicholas kulish

— to capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties in terms of who we let in.

archived recording

Another shift in President Trump’s immigration policy as the administration announced it would deny green cards to immigrants who seek out food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of public assistance, while favoring wealthier immigrants.

archived recording (kenneth cuccinelli)

President Trump has once again delivered on his promise to the American people to enforce longstanding immigration law.

nicholas kulish

You see most recently reducing access to public benefits for migrants, for legal migrants.

archived recording (kenneth cuccinelli)

A rule that encourages and ensures self-reliance and self-sufficiency for those seeking to come to or to stay in the United States.

nicholas kulish

Like this new rule that was issued on public charges.

archived recording (kenneth cuccinelli)

If people are not able to be self-sufficient, then this negative factor is going to bear very heavily against them in a decision about whether they’ll be able to become a legal permanent resident.

nicholas kulish

The overarching idea they started with is fewer people. And for that, you have to do legal as well as illegal immigration.

natalie kitroeff

Nick, do you think that without Cordelia Scaife May, these views don’t become mainstream? Should her money be seen as the critical driver for the movement?

nicholas kulish

That’s a really good question, because look, there are a lot of tectonic forces at play in the world, like offshoring and automation and migration driven by climate change, that really helped push this onto the agenda and would have anyway, even if there wasn’t a Mrs. May. But what is undeniable is that four decades of well-funded groups able to push these ideas with her money now gaining political power and literally being part of making the policy. I think it’s very fair to think of her as a driver of this issue as well as this movement.

[music]

natalie kitroeff

Thank you so much, Nick.

nicholas kulish

Thanks for having me.

natalie kitroeff

We’ll be right back.

michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today. In the capital of Afghanistan, a suicide bomber posing as a guest at a wedding blew himself up on Saturday night, killing at least 63 people and wounding 182. It was among the most lethal attacks on civilians there in the past few years and highlighted the limits of a proposed peace deal between the U.S. and the Taliban, which is responsible for most violence in the country. Saturday’s suicide bombing was claimed by an affiliate of ISIS, not the Taliban. And congressional Democrats and Republicans are criticizing a decision by Israel to bar two members of the House, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, from traveling to the country. Israel barred the lawmakers at the request of President Trump. Both are highly critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but it appeared that Israel was prepared to allow them in until Trump intervened. Both Tlaib and Omar will address the travel restrictions during a news conference later this morning. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

The New York Times investigated how Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon family’s banking and industrial fortune, used her wealth to sow the seeds of the modern anti-immigration movement — and of Trump administration policy.

Groups that Mrs. May funded shared policy proposals with the Trump campaign, sent staff members to join the administration and have close ties to Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s immigration agenda.